Slow molasses drip under a tipped-up crescent moon.

Most Played Songs of 2014

Today is the day that I reset the play counts on all of the Smith Family iPods after a year of data gathering and consolidation. I used to wait right until December 31st, but I’ve found that Marcia and I almost always want something fresh through various holiday trips and hectic work season, so early December has become iPod playlist reprogramming time.

The most interesting playlist to clear is the collection of “most played songs” for the year. Since we synch all of our gadgets to one computer and one iTunes account, this “most played songs” list in our household represent the aggregated play counts from my car, my gym, Marcia’s car, Marcia’s gym, and the collaborative family iPod that stays in the house’s stereo dock and is played by Marcia, Katelin and I.

So the “most played songs” of the year are often interesting and unexpected, since they represent the points where our family’s musical tastes and listening habits most closely overlap, even though each of us individually may listen to very different things than the other family members. My love for Napalm Death, for example, will never likely result in any of their songs making this list, since Katelin and Marcia both immediately skip them anytime they come up on any iPod. And we all listen to music a lot, so that’s a lot of skips, offset by a lot of listens to the things that everybody actually does like.

I’ve got 12,000+ songs on my computer right now, and we only played about 5,000 of them at least once in 2014. So now is the point where I look at those other 7,000 songs and start making lists of things we haven’t heard in over 365 days, which is always a fun process. It’s like shopping my closet, only louder.

With all of that as preamble, here are the 40 most played songs in our household in 2014. I offer some links for exploration of some of the more obscure numbers, if you’re inclined to hear what it sounds like in our dining room at night, while Marcia beats our asses down at whatever game we’re playing: